Operating System Internals and Administration Questions

Fundamental and advanced operating system concepts that underlie system administration across platforms. Topics include process and thread management, scheduling and concurrency, memory management and swapping, virtual memory and page replacement, input output and disk performance, file system architecture and semantics, system call interfaces, kernel parameters and tuning, authentication and permission models, boot and initialization sequences, monitoring and system performance analysis, and general techniques for debugging and diagnosing systemic operating system issues. Candidates should be able to explain not only how to perform administrative tasks but why the underlying mechanisms behave as they do and how design choices affect performance and reliability.

HardTechnical

62 practiced

Discuss how virtualization (full virtualization vs paravirtualization) affects OS internals: impacts on TLB behavior and TLB shootdowns, page-table management (shadow page tables vs nested page tables), timer and interrupt handling, and I/O virtualization (vhost, virtio). Explain how these differences affect tuning choices for both host and guest kernels.

EasyTechnical

65 practiced

Explain the difference between a hard link and a symbolic link on Unix-like systems. Discuss how inodes are used, behavior across filesystems, the effect on disk usage and file deletion semantics, and any pitfalls when using links for backups or configuration management.

MediumTechnical

80 practiced

A cloud VM experiences periodic disk latency spikes that impact application performance. Describe a systematic troubleshooting approach to determine whether the root cause is at the guest OS, hypervisor/host, network, or remote storage backend. Which metrics and tools would you collect at each layer and how would you correlate them?

MediumSystem Design

77 practiced

Design an OS-level backup and disaster recovery plan for a medium-sized web server fleet (~100 Linux servers). Address application and filesystem consistency, scheduling, snapshotting technologies (LVM, ZFS, btrfs), offsite replication, bootable restores, verification/testing, and automation tools you would choose to minimize RTO/RPO.

EasyTechnical

78 practiced

Write a Bash one-liner or short script to find the top 10 largest regular files under /var and print file size (human readable), full path, and inode. The script must avoid descending into other mounted filesystems and handle spaces and special characters in filenames. Specify the commands you would use and any options required.

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